Russia’s financial strategy until 2010 has been one-third completed, reported the Center for Strategic Development at a conference on the results of the first phase of reforms.
“If we could go back to the early 2000s, I would start with the reform of power,” said Sberbank president and former Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref at the conference "Strategy-2010: Results and New Challenges.”
The most important consequence of the reforms has been to create a strong pool of reformers, said Gref. "Today there are people whose opinion steers the country and whose opinion is valued in the world, and this is also a consequence of reform.”
Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said the goal of doubling GDP that was part of the strategy has almost been achieved. The only hindrance was the crisis of 2008. Even more impressive was the growth of GDP per capita for the years 2000-2008: from $7,800 to $15,900, said Kudrin. “In this way, we entered another category — that of the middle-income countries. We have average standards of living, management, market conditions and institutions, which have developed over the past 10 years,” Kudrin said.
According to Gref, the reforms that worked were those where there was political will, a circle of stakeholders and a reform leader. One of the key issues concerning the reform of the state was removed from the official text of the strategy and is preserved only in the expert version. “The key failure of this reform was that we did not pay attention to factors such as the reform of government and education in the narrow sense — the education of the ruling class and the elite, who were involved in implementing the reforms,” said Gref. Many of the reforms implied a high degree of change, and many ministers did not agree with what had to be done.
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